


black and blue

by waveydnp



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2009 Era (Phandom), Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:48:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24388435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waveydnp/pseuds/waveydnp
Summary: dan and phil lie in bed and trade stories of the various injuries they’ve sustained throughout their lives
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 34
Kudos: 208





	black and blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [midnight_radio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnight_radio/gifts).



> i hope i did the prompt justice andrea 🖤

Dan wakes up with a feeling that it’s too early. December morning air touches the tip of his nose with a chill, but under the covers everything is warm and cozy. There’s an arm draped across his stomach, and as he comes to a little more he remembers who that arm belongs to. He remembers why the pillow his face is buried in smells different than it does when he’s at home. 

Because he’s not at home. He’s at Phil’s home, sleeping in Phil’s bed, waking up with Phil’s arm draped across his stomach and the smell of Phil’s shampoo on the pillow. 

He rolls onto his back and throws his arm over his eyes. There’s too much feeling inside him, too many nerves, too much excitement. Too much disbelief that he gets to have a whole week of mornings where he wakes up in the arms of AmazingPhil. The duvet they’re cuddled underneath is the same blue and green one from the videos, but the voice that murmurs, “Morning, gorgeous,” is different. It’s deeper. Softer. It’s one that’s just for Dan.

Dan smiles. It cracks his face wide open and he hasn’t even looked at whatever morning glory of black hair and blue eyes are waiting for him yet. “Shut up,” he croaks, unable to conceal even a hint of his delight.

“You’re so pretty when you sleep,” Phil says.

“Only when I sleep?”

“No. Shut up. S’just different.” He pulls Dan’s arm down and Dan turns his head to look and the sight of Phil is even more disarming than he remembered.

“Different how?”

“You look younger.” He sweeps Dan’s fringe out of his eyes. The tenderness of it is almost too much. “Peaceful.”

“It’s peaceful here,” Dan says quietly. Early mornings are almost as effective as late nights at wringing the truth from him. 

Or maybe it’s just Phil. Dan’s not got a good grip yet on the way it disarms him to feel this wanted. This safe.

Phil drags a finger lightly across Dan’s cheek. “This kind of makes you look like a pirate, though.”

Dan snorts. “What?”

“It looks like a scar.”

“What does, you spork?”

“You’ve got, like—” He traces over Dan’s cheek again. “Like an imprint from the pillow.”

“Thank god it’s not.”

“It looks kind of cool, though.” Phil grins. “Manly.”

Dan rolls his eyes. “Doesn’t sound like me.”

“Mm, I dunno,” Phil says in that uniquely sexy gruff morning voice as he ducks his face under Dan’s chin. He presses his mouth to Dan’s throat and they both seem to forget about whatever the hell nonsense they’d been talking about just a few seconds prior. 

Dan works his arm under Phil’s neck and pulls him impossibly closer, arching his neck so Phil can get to more of it with those wandering lips of his. Phil’s jaw is stubbled and it makes Dan’s skin prick up with goosebumps from head to toe. 

“I think you’re manly enough,” Phil says, breath warm.

Dan’s toes are curling and uncurling. It feels too good already, and he’s not really thinking properly about anything else, which is why the next thing he says is so completely and utterly stupid. “I’m so manly that I’ve got a scar on my elbow that looks like a smiley face.”

It’s stupid because it makes Phil jerk his head back. “What? Really?”

Dan feels the loss acutely, but he tries to act like he doesn’t. It’s embarrassing how quickly he gets worked up from the slightest of Phil’s attention.

He’s still got Phil’s attention though, albeit in a different way, and that’s almost as good. 

He nods. “Wanna see?”

“Do you even need to ask?”

Dan smiles sheepishly, sitting up and folding his arm in front of him to search the bottom of his forearm for the telltale little mark. He finds it and points, and Phil has to sit up and lean in and squint, but when he finally sees it, his whole face lights up. “Oh my god! You actually do.”

“I wouldn’t lie about something so idiotic.”

“It’s not idiotic, it’s brilliant.” Phil takes Dan’s arm in his hands so he can study it in greater detail. “How’d that even happen.”

“Allergic reaction,” Dan says, enjoying the view of a shirtless Phil now that he’s not cocooned in his sheets. 

Phil’s eyes flick up to meet Dan’s. “To what?”

“A stamp. At school. Can’t remember what it was for now, only that it got all red and swelled up like a fucking balloon.”

Phil hisses sympathetically.

“Yeah. It was actually kind of horrific. I cried, like, a lot. I think my grandma even had to come pick me up.”

Phil’s face goes soft. “Aww, baby Danny.” He leans in and kisses the barely-there scar tissue.

Dan’s insides riot with fondness, but he shoves gently against Phil’s face with his arm and mutters, “Shut up.”

“That’s definitely cooler than a pirate face scar,” Phil declares.

“But not as manly.”

Phil answers by shoving the blanket off his body and pulling his right leg up to his chest. “Look,” he says, pointing to his knee.

Dan is momentarily stunned by the sheer amount of flesh Phil has on show. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of boxers and an expectant look, waiting for Dan to acknowledge whatever it is Dan’s supposed to be noticing.

He jabs his finger against his kneecap. “See?”

Dan leans in just as Phil had done to his elbow. There’s a small half moon of silvery scar tissue that Dan would have gone his whole life not seeing if it hadn’t been brought to his attention. 

“I see.”

“It’s not a smiley face, but it’s also very un-manly.”

Dan smirks. “Nick yourself shaving?”

“Ha ha,” Phil deadpans. “Do you wanna hear the story or not?”

Dan pulls his own legs up and rests his chin on his knuckles, blinking up at Phil cartoonishly.

“I was in the conservatory—”

“Rich kid.”

“Shut up! I tripped over trying to catch a bee and my knee landed right on a nail that was sticking up out of the wood.”

Dan winces. “Dear god.”

“That’s not even the worst bit. I was sat there bleeding all over the place crying and when my dad found me like that he started shouting at me.”

“The fuck? Why?”

Phil shrugs. “He always did that. It’s like he thought I was being clumsy on purpose.”

“Dads can be real cunts.”

This time it’s Phil who winces. 

“Sorry,” Dan mumbles. He reaches out and rubs his thumb over Phil’s scar. “Did it hurt?”

“Loads. It went right up in there. Needed like three stitches, which doesn’t sound like a lot but— Yeah. It was awful. There was just this perfectly round hole in my knee.”

“That’s kind of badass.”

“Remember the part when I said I was trying to catch a bee?”

Dan smiles. “Okay, well. Yeah. That’s extremely adorable. And also stupid. Bees sting.”

Phil pouts his bottom lip out. “It was so fuzzy and soft looking, I wanted to stroke it.”

“How have you managed to survive this long?”

“I’m lucky.”

Dan rolls his eyes. “Luck isn’t real. It isn’t a thing.” 

He’s not sure how much conviction he has about that. Looking at his life now compared to a couple years ago, he can’t deny that it _feels_ a lot like luck. Or maybe some kind of cosmic reparation for what he’d been put through in the first eighteens years of his life. Not that he believes in cosmic forces either, beyond the purely scientific variety.

Phil remains unruffled. “It is. It definitely is.”

Dan pats his arm in an aggressive act of condescension. “Whatever you say, mate.”

No sooner has he gotten the words out than he’s being tackled backwards onto the mattress and Phil is hitching his leg to make a seat of Dan’s lap. 

“You’ve gotta stop with that,” Dan says, undercutting his words entirely with his gigantic grin and the laughter in his tone.

“Nope. I don’t,” Phil retorts, squeezing Dan’s hips with his knees. 

It’s too much in the best kind of way, all that pale bare Phil skin on top of him; all that jet black Phil hair falling into eyes that are twinkling playfully as they stare down at Dan. It hasn’t even been a couple months but already Dan can’t fathom a life without this. He lets himself be brave and runs a hand up Phil’s thigh, slipping his fingers a few inches under the leg of his boxers. 

“Good,” he says, pitching his voice down. “I don’t actually ever want you to stop.”

“That works out, because I’m not going to.”

Dan bites back the question on his tongue, the urge to ask what Phil could possibly see in him that makes his face look like _that_ , like he thinks Dan is every bit as amazing as Dan thinks Phil is. He doesn’t want to waste any of their precious time being stupid and insecure when Phil hasn’t given him any reason to feel that way. 

“What else?” Dan asks, hand sliding all the way up to the waistband of Phil’s pants. 

Phil tilts his head slightly, frowning in amusement. “What else what?”

“What other injuries have you had? What other scars? What broken bones.” He swallows hard, fingers brushing coarse hair. “I wanna know everything.”

Phil cocks his eyebrows and looks down at where Dan’s hand is tenting his underwear. “That’s a bit… distracting.”

Dan yanks his hand back.

“I didn’t say I wanted you to stop.”

Dan throws his arm over his eyes again. “You’re too fit. That’s what’s distracting.”

Then Phil’s hands are on Dan’s chest and his voice is low. “You’re one to talk, Dan.”

It goes straight to his dick. There’s no way Phil doesn’t feel it. It’s embarrassing, but also so completely beyond his control that he doesn’t even feel that bad about it. Phil pulls his arm away and leans down to kiss him and Dan keeps his eyes closed as he kisses back.

His insides riot with it as much as they did the first time. He’s starting to get properly well acquainted with Phil’s mouth and the way it moves against his, but that doesn’t seem to make it any less intoxicating. 

He has the wild thought that he wants it forever. 

He wants to ask if Phil feels like that too. He wants to ask if he’s kissed anyone else since that sunny day in October, if this means as much to him as it means to Dan. He wants to know if they’re boyfriends now.

He wants to know, but he thinks maybe he already does. Maybe he doesn’t need to ask. They sat on Phil’s sofa yesterday hand in hand as they cried over a children’s film. They spend more nights on Skype together than not. They’ve lost entire days just to lying in bed, talking and kissing and sometimes even touching each other. Phil never makes him feel stupid or annoying or too much. Not too much or too little but just the right amount of himself, and Dan can confidently say he’s never had that before. 

Phil rolls off Dan’s lap too soon, but immediately he’s wrapping his arm around Dan’s waist and pulling him in so they’re chest to chest. “I broke my hand at uni,” he says, “doing a piggyback race.”

“Were you the rider or the ridee?”

“Ridee,” Phil says. “Though I guess not a very good one as I tripped over my own feet and we both ended up sprawled on the pavement.”

“That sounds brutal.”

“It wasn’t as bad as the nail,” Phil admits. “I was older, obviously.”

“And hammered, I assume?”

Phil’s tongue pokes out from between his teeth. “Shush.”

“I’ve broken my hand too,” Dan says. “Well, my finger.”

“Oh really?”

Dan nods. “On a water slide.”

Phil makes a satisfyingly mortified face.

“I actually didn’t realize it til later that night. I just thought it was banged up from how hard I hit it, but then—” He stops himself abruptly.

“Then?”

“Then I tried to use it for… something. And it hurt. A lot.”

Phil narrows his eyes. “Use it how?”

“Um.” He just looks at Phil helplessly. 

Phil bursts out laughing. “Oh my god, Dan. Seriously?”

“I was a teenager, okay? I had… hormones. Plus I reckoned some endorphins would help me forget the pain for a few minutes.”

Phil shakes his head fondly. “You’re still a teenager, by the way. Technically.”

“A teenager with a crooked little finger.” He holds his hand up to demonstrate. “My grandma had to take me to hospital. We waited in a&e for like five hours and I was sweating the whole time. I was convinced she knew what I’d been trying to do.”

Phil catches Dan’s finger and presses his mouth to it. “Did they give you a tiny little cast?”

“No, not even. It was big. Covered my whole hand. I felt like the world’s most giant loser.”

“If I’d known you then I would’ve signed it for you,” Phil says. “When I was a kid I was desperate to break my arm so that I could have a cast for people to sign. I spent a whole afternoon once just climbing a tree in my back garden and jumping off hoping I’d land wrong.”

“Good god, man,” Dan mutters, horrified. “Your poor mother.”

“I was super young. This was before I broke my nose. After that I definitely never fantasized about injuring myself.”

“You broke your nose, too?”

Phil nods. “In primary school. Playing trains with a bunch of other kids and I was at the front. For some reason I thought it’d be a good idea to stop right in front of a brick wall.”

Dan is already cringing away from the mental image before Phil continues, “They all smashed into me from behind, obviously. My whole face just got crushed.”

“Fuck me. That’s…” He feels a pang of sympathy pain for poor baby Phil. 

“That was definitely the worst one,” Phil says. “I bled in some girl's hair and she started crying. I probably looked like some kind of hideous hell beast.”

Dan reaches up and pinches the bridge of Phil’s nose. “Huh. I would never have known.”

“Yeah, I guess I had a good doctor that day,” Phil says, crinkling his nose under Dan’s fingers. “No bentness. Hurt like hell, though. My whole face was bruised for weeks after. My mum cried.”

“Poor Kath.”

“I put her through a lot back then,” Phil agrees. “It’s honestly a wonder I never had anything worse.”

Dan’s had worse. Not in the technical sense, not injuries that would send him to hospital or make his mum cry to witness, but he’s definitely had worse than a hairline fracture in his pinky bone and an allergic reaction to stamp ink. His injuries go a lot deeper than flesh and blood.

He doesn’t need to tell Phil that. Not right now. Maybe someday, if Phil sticks around long enough. If Dan gets a little braver.

“I chipped my tooth as a kid,” Dan says. That story is easy to tell. It doesn’t reflect a wounded soul.

“Lemme see.”

Dan curls his top lip back and points at the offending tooth.

“Huh,” Phil murmurs. “The amount of time I spend thinking about your mouth, you’d think I’d have noticed that.”

“Shut up!” Dan squawks, shoving Phil’s shoulder as his stomach swoops. He can’t compute the idea that Phil is really and truly _into him_ , that this whole thing isn’t just one sided infatuation. “You perv.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s a good mouth.”

Dan hides his face in his hands. Maybe he’ll be able to conceal how splotchy and red it’s gone.

But Phil pulls his hands away. He doesn’t let Dan hide. He cups a hand round the back of Dan’s neck and leans in for a kiss that goes and goes until Dan can feel that he isn’t the only one who's getting worked up.

“How’d you chip your tooth?” Phil asks.

It takes Dan a moment to clear the fog of lust from his brain enough to remember anything that isn’t his white hot need to put his mouth to proper use. “Um… on an apple.”

“An apple?”

“Yeah, stupid, right? My grandma gave me an apple and I guess I… bit into it too hard?”

“How is that even possible?” Phil asks. He’s still got his hand round the back of Dan’s neck, though now his grip is loose, fingers threaded up into his hair.

“No idea.”

“Maybe your grandma had mutant fruit.”

“Maybe your mum had mutant fruit,” Dan says back.

“Nah, I ate like pure crap as a child. If it wasn’t packaged and processed I pretty much refused to eat it.”

Dan smiles. “So you were a stubborn little shit even when you were tiny?”

“Oi.” Phil smushes his unbent nose into Dan’s. “It’s her fault for being a terrible cook.”

“Apples don’t need to be cooked,” Dan points out.

“Yeah but apparently they break your teeth, so who’s the real idiot here?”

“Are you calling baby Dan an idiot, Phil? Really?”

Phil bites his tongue as he smiles sheepishly, and Dan decides they’ve done more than enough talking. He lets himself be brave again - because touching AmazingPhil still feels like something he shouldn’t be allowed to do whenever he fancies it - and rolls on top of Phil’s body. Phil’s smile disappears, his hands gripping Dan’s waist as Dan leans in to continue the kiss that had been so rudely interrupted.

They get about thirty seconds into something Dan can feel in his bones is going to be a treasured dirty memory for many lonely nights to come, when they’re interrupted again - this time by Phil’s own stomach. It growls so loudly it’s like an angry little asshole dog sandwiched between their bodies.

Dan bursts out laughing, pushing his weight off Phil’s chest and onto the hands bracketing Phil’s head on the pillow. “Tell me how you really feel, mate.”

Phil slaps a hand over his face. “My own organs are cockblocking me.”

Even just hearing Phil say the word is enough to send blood rushing between Dan’s legs, but he forces himself to roll off of Phil’s body and pull his hand away from his face. “Not blocking, just delaying a bit, yeah?”

Phil looks at him. His lips are kissed a deep pink and embarrassment colours his cheeks similarly. He smiles. “Yeah.”


End file.
